If it's only about the "editor" part of Emacs then I would recommend starting with an Emacs-like editor mg[1]. It's clean, small and has nice manpage that I fee

If it's only about the "editor" part of Emacs then I would recommend starting with an Emacs-like editor mg[1]. It's clean, small and has nice manpage that I feel wouldn't overwhelm newcomers. It also has some of the basic commands helpful for programming. [1] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mg http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=mg